At the time, the NYT was one of the main papers reporting that Georgia was the offensive party — just as they were the only U.S. paper talking about the weeks of shelling beforehand. You might think this report doesn’t confirm your biases enough, but accusing them of “burying” this idea, or of criminal neglience or something, is just not called for.

That was why I (and presumably also MoA) gave them such high credence at the time. The NYT did not. And even the latest report by Chivers and Barry buries the identity and name of the OSCE, and then casts Grist’s fairly definitive findings into a degree of doubt by saying things like, “well, both sides have their own explanations of what happened” and “it’s hard to find out the real truth”, etc, etc.

One of the main goals of the OSCE in fielding these (fairly expensive) monitoring teams is to prevent the eruption and escalation of armed conflict by providing accurate ground-level reporting of incidents. They deserve considerably more respect, recognition, and support than they usually get in the US MSM. Treating OSCE reporting as “just one source among many conflicting sources” completely misreads their real capabilities, role, and importance.

The NYT was one of my main sources for all of this, too. Their reporting has been consistently superior to other American news organizations. Chivers and his editors in New York would have been negligent not to run the story last month about Saakashvili releasing audio recordings of radio broadcasts hinting that Russia attacked first… especially since that was the cornerstone of their declaration of innocence in the whole affair.

Just as they would have been negligent not to report this today. I didn’t see in either yours or MOA’s blogging at the time any evidence that the OSCE observers’ account was conclusive in discounting all other accounts of the conflict — rather, they confirmed your (plural) and my working hypothesis that Georgia was the aggressor. Interesting, yes, but hardly the smoking gun of negligence you’re making it out to be.

Chivers and the NYT in general either ignored completely or seriously downplayed the value of those monitoring reports back then. Only now, once the meme of “vulnerable, innocent little Georgia” has had three months to take root in the US public discourse, do they go back and mention OSCE monitoring reports whose conclusions were already widely available at the time, and were reported back to OSCE HQ and the EU. (But Washington, also a member of OSCE, apparently didn’t request a briefing on them.)

The only new thing in Chivers’ latest report is buried ways down low where he says that Brit. Army Captain Ryan Grist, who had been head of the OSCE monitoring team, later left his post under unclear circumstances.

You and your readers would benefit from checking out the main post and comments on this at MoA today. You could also go back and check some of what I was blogging in August about the OSCE reports, at Just World News, portal here.